Although it is not until towards the end of the
eighteenth century that the Scot begins to play an important role on the
Canadian stage, his connection with the Dominion is far older. The Scots
have always been wanderers, but until the Union of 1707 they went mostly
to the Continent of Europe. The reason for this was that the colonies
across the Atlantic were English settlements and the Scot was not
permitted to go there. He was an alien in the eyes of the English law.
Navigation Acts, ever since the time of Cromwell, had been passed for
the fostering of English and the crippling of Scottish trade. The
English Navy enforced these decrees. The result was that the Continent
was literally filled with Scottish soldiers of fortune. As Scott puts it
in the Introduction to A Legend of Montrose:

'The contempt of commerce entertained by young
men having some pretence to gentility, the poverty of the country of
Scotland, the natural disposition to . . . adventure, all conduced
to lead the Scots abroad into the military service of countries
which were at war with each other.'

In France, particularly, the Scots acquired an
immense influence. In fact, they were destined to prove "the nerve of
the French army at a time when the people were sunk in wretchedness,
dispirited by defeats of no ordinary character, and had lost all hope of
self-helpfulness."

Poland was another happy hunting-ground for the
Scots. They went to that country in various capacities  as pedlars of
tinware and knives and scissors, as colporteurs, as soldiers, as
statesmen. Fynes Morison, writing in 1598, tells us that

'The Scots flock in great numbers into Poland,
abounding in all things for food and yielding many commodities. And
in these kingdoms they lived at this time in great multitudes,
rather for the poverty of their own kingdom than for any great
traffic they exercised there.'

Many of the Scots who went to Poland grew rich, and
Stephen Batory, who was King in Poland from 1576 until 1586, gave them a
special district in Cracow to live in. That amazing peripatetic, William
Lithgow, who wrote The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adven-tures and
Painfull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares, asserts that there
were thirty thousand Scots in the country in 1625. The tie between the
Poles and the Scots was strengthened, if that is the correct word in
this connection, when James Stuart, the Old Pretender, married
Clementina, the daughter of John Sobieski. They were the parents of
"Bonnie" Prince Charles who, according to his admirers, was a
presentable young man, but according to the ladies of Glasgow, who were
Whigs, the very reverse. Ivor Brown, the versatile editor of The
Observer, goes so far as to assert that "the various strangely
dissimilar portraits (of Ascanius) are a greater tribute to Highland
finery than to the Stuart facade."

A typical Scots soldier of fortune was Sir James
Turner, (1615-1686), a son of the minister of Borth-wick. Turner is the
original of Dugald Dalgetty. His Memoirs make fascinating
reading.

'I was not seventeen years old when I left the
schooles, where I had lightlie passed through that course of
philosophie which is ordinarlie taught in the Universities of
Scotland ... I stayed a yeare after with my father at Dalkeith,
applying myself to the study of humane letters and historic, in both
which I always tooke delight . . . But before I attained to the
eighteenth yeare of my age, a restless desire entered my mind to be,
if not an actor, at least a spectator of these warrs which at that
time made so much a noyse over all the world, and were managed
against the Roman Emperor and the Catholicke League in Germanie,
under the auspicious conduct of the thrice famous Gustavus Adolphus,
King of Sweden. Sir James Lumsdaine was then levieing a regiment for
that service; with him (my neer-est friends consenting to it) I
engaged to go over ensigney to his brother Robert Lumsdaine, eldest
Capitaine.'

Turner was an unprincipled gun-man, a bullying,
hard-drinking thug; but he was not the "butcher" Defoe makes him out to
have been. Andrew Lang's opinion that Turner was "infinitely more of a
Christian than the Saints of the Covenant" is preposterous. It is the
sort of thing we would expect Lang to say. Turner spent the latter years
of his life at his place in Ayrshire writing his Memoirs and his
Pallas Armata, a series of essay jottings on the art of war.

Another fascinating autobiography is that of Patrick
Gordon of Cruden (1635-1699), extracts from which were edited by Joseph
Robertson in 1859. Under the year 1651 Gordon writes:

'Having thus, by the most loveing care of my dear
parents attained to as much learning as the ordinary country schools
affoard, and being unwilling, because of my dissenting in religion,
to go to the University in Scotland, I resolved . . . to go to some
foreigne country, not careing much on what pretence, or to what
country I should go, seeing I had no knowne friend in any foreigne
place.'

Gordon had a chance to take service under the King of
Poland but decided not to do so for this reason:

'If I take service in Poland there are the
ordinary risks of the soldier's life, the ordinary chances of
promotion; if, however, I take service under the Czar, the risks are
greater, but the chances of promotion likewise greater.'

So Patrick went to Muscovy and became
Commander-in-Chief of the armies of Peter the Great.

* * * * * *

In the seventeenth century many young Scots students
of law attended the Dutch Universities and during the "persecuting
times" the Low Countries were a haven for the Covenanters. John Erskine
of Carnock describes in his Diary the Scots colony in Rotterdam
in March, 1685.

4th. This afternoon I landed at Rotterdam, and
went to James Bruce's coffee-house, where I met first with my
brother Charles.

5th. I was dining in Mr. Robert Fleming, and did
see the Laird of Westshields.

6th. I met with Mr. Robert Langlands, my old
master, whom I longed much to see. I was with William Sythrum and
several other friends.

7th. I dined with Mr. Forrester, and was
afternoon in Mr. Russell's, and with Doctor Blackader in the Scots
coffee-house.

8th. I was at the Scots Church and did hear Mr.
Robert Fleming, Acts xiv. 22, and Mr. John Hogg, Psalm xi. 1, both
ministers of the Scots congregation at Rotterdam. I heard also Mr.
Patrick Verner in the Kirk.

9th. I took a chamber this day in Robert Gibb's,
sometime merchant in Stirling, having staid until now with my
brother Charles.

The Jacobite troubles sent many Scots scurrying to
the Continent  men like the Keith brothers, one of whom became a
Field-Marshal under Frederick the Great and died "gloriously" at
Hochkirchen in 1758. The '45 was responsible for another Scots invasion,
and at least two of the Prince's followers, the Chevalier de Johnstone
and the Commandant de Ramezay, took service with the French and fought
against the English at Louisbourg and Quebec. The Chevalier wrote an
account of the battle on the heights of Abraham, which he called a
Dialogue in Hades, where the speakers were supposed to be Wolfe and
Montcalm; the Franco-Scottish de Ramezay handed over the keys of the
Citadel of Quebec to General James Murray, another Scot, who had been
Wolfe's ablest lieutenant.

* * * * * *

But, despite the prohibitions and the Navigation Acts
of the English, the Scots actually did try their hand at colonising.
They were extraordinarily successful in Ulster, for instance, although
Ulster can hardly be termed a colonial venture in the strict sense of
the term. But in 1621, thirty-eight years after the founding of the
first English colony, Newfoundland, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the Privy
Council of Scotland granted Sir William Alexander a charter for the
territory which is now roughly covered by Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
The French knew the district as Acadie, and when Richelieu learned what
was afoot he sent a squadron to enforce the claims of his master, Louis
XIII, to the territory. The expedition was
wiped out by a Franco-Scot, David Kirke. Kirke not only destroyed
seventeen of the eighteen ships that were sent by Richelieu, but seized
Tadoussac, and in July, 1629, forced Champlain to surrender at Quebec.
Three years later, however, Charles I gave the French back their colony
in return for half of his marriage settlement which had never been paid.
Scotland thus lost her first colony. The Scots who had gone there as
settlers either came back to Scotland thoroughly disgruntled or stayed
on and intermarried with the French.

In the year in which Sir William Alexander obtained
his Charter for Nova Scotia the name of Abraham Martin, dit
l'Ecossais, appears in the Quebec registers. Martin, after whom the
Plains were named, was the first known pilot on the St. Lawrence. A
daughter of his married Medart Chouart Groseillers, whom we have
mentioned already and who, indirectly, played an important part in the
development of Canada. Sir George Carteret met Groseillers and his
friend Radisson at Boston in 1665, heard about the fur trade from them
and induced them to come to England, where they met Charles
II at Oxford. The result was the granting of a
Royal Charter five years later to Prince Rupert and the founding of the
Hudson's Bay Company. The Company was at first an entirely English
concern, but it gradually fell into the hands of the Scots. Its
officials were largely recruited from the Orkneys and the Highlands.
Douglas MacKay, who wrote The Honourable Company, describes the

Orcadians as "a close, prudent, quiet people,
strictly faithful to their employers." But there is reason to doubt the
accuracy of this picture.

* * * * * *

The Scots made another attempt at colonisation. Lord
Ochiltree tried to settle some of his countrymen in Cape Breton Island
but in the fall of 1629 the settlers were ejected by the French and
shipped back to Europe. To add insult to injury the French built the
fortress of Louisburg on the site of the Scots settlement. The Scots
also founded settlements in East New Jersey and South Carolina. They
called the latter Stuart's Town. These Scots were refugees from
religious persecution in their own country and one of their leaders was
William Dunbar, afterwards Principal of Glasgow University. In 1686 the
Spaniards and their Indian allies wiped the place out. Then the Scots
made one last effort as an independent nation to have a colony of their
own. A company was organised by William Paterson, the founder of the
Bank of England, to trade with the West Indies, and in 1695 the
settlement was authorised by the Scots Parliament. Settlers were sent
out to Darien but everything was against them. William was officially
opposed to the scheme because the London merchants who financed him
hated the idea of independent Scottish colonial competition. The
Governors of the English colonies in the West Indies were accordingly
ordered to give the Scots no help whatsoever, and the result was that
the Scots had to surrender to the Spaniards. That was the end of their
dream of colonial expansion as an independent nation. The immediate
result of the Darien fiasco was intense bitterness between the English
because they had been wronged by them; the English hated the Scots
because they had injured them. The affair almost issued in war between
the two countries. What it finally did was to hasten the Union of 1707,
and when that Treaty was signed the English gave their northern
neighbours £398,085 to compensate them for the financial loss they had
suffered. The Union meant the death of the Scots as an independent
nation; it also meant the opening up of new possibilities for them. But
from now on, as Andrew Dewar Gibbs points out, the directing brain lay
... in England, and it was an essentially English Empire that Scotsmen
were ... to help in building . . . When Scotsmen next went overseas it
was to do the business, fight the battles, and found the colonies of
imperial England.' [Scottish Empire, pp. 5 and 30.]

* * * * * *

Until three years or so before the American
Revolution the coming of the Scots to Canada was sporadic. Most of these
Scots were soldiers and administrators; those who came later were
traders and colonisers. The wars with the French brought an influx of
Scottish soldiers to the country and it is hardly an exaggeration to say
that if it had not been for the valour of these men the conquest of
Canada could not have taken place as quickly as it did. Some years
before the '45 Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of
Session, had suggested the formation of a Gaelic gendarmerie to
police the Highlands. Out of this idea grew first the famous Black
Watch. Then the elder Pitt, taking his cue from Forbes, formed the 77th,
or Montgomery's regiment, which was named after the Colonel, Archibald
Mont-gomerie, son of the Earl of Eglintoun. In the words of John Richard
Green, at a time "when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots,
Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had . .
. enlist(ed) on the side of loyalty." ['I sought for merit wherever it
could be found . . . and found it in the mountains of the North. I
called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of
men; men who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey to the artifices
of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the State, in the
war before the last. These men, in the last war, were brought to combat
on your side; they served with fidelity as they fought with valour, and
conquered for you in every quarter of the world.' Extract from speech,
delivered in the House of Commons in 1759. Quoted by John Anderson in
his Essay On the State of Society and Knowledge in the Highlands of
Scotland, p. 137, (1827).]Another regiment, the 78th, or
Fraser Highlanders, was raised by Simon Fraser, the son of the notorious
Simon who was executed on Tower Hill in 1747 for his share in the '45.

The history of the Fraser Highlanders is an
interesting one and has a very direct bearing on Canadian development.
After Culloden one of the English officers stationed in Inverness with
the English "army of occupation" was young Major Wolfe, who was on
Cumberland's staff at Culloden. Wolfe disliked Scotland and the Scots,
the Highlanders, especially. He was an odd young man. He did not make
friends easily and had the reputation among the Highland families who
put themselves out of the way to be pleasant to the English officers of
the army of occupation, of being stiff and aloof. He was bored and
unhappy and wrote disgruntled and bitter letters to his father. But by a
fortunate chance John Forbes, the son of the famous Duncan, was living
in Culloden House, or, rather, was occupying part of it, as his father
had lost thousands of pounds in the Hanoverian cause and had left the
estate, in consequence, heavily mortgaged. John Forbes remembered Wolfe;
they had been subalterns together and had fought with the Guards at
Dettingen. They had never been particularly friendly as John was bent on
having what is called a good time while Wolfe studied his military
manuals. It was, however, the most natural thing in the world that
Forbes  although he had a sickly wife  should invite his former
comrade to Culloden House and that Wolfe should meet there young Simon
Fraser who had lost his title and estates temporarily and was at the
time practising law in Edinburgh.

Wolfe was, despite his dislike for the Scots, a fair
and open-minded young man. He was an English officer, loyal to his
caste, but under no delusions as to the quality of the troops in the
English regiments in those days. When he heard of Braddock's disaster at
Fort Duquesne, (1755), he wrote to his father these scathing words about
the red-coats:

'I know their discipline to be bad and their
valour precarious. They are easily put into disorder, and hard to
recover out of it. They frequently kill their officers through fear,
and murder one another in their confusion. Their shameful behaviour
in Scotland . . . clearly denoted the extreme ignorance of the
officers, and the disobedient and dastardly courage of the men.'

Wolfe knew, too, that the Government victory at
Culloden had been a touch-and-go affair. Jail-birds, drunkards and
hardened criminals had been pitted against a disorderly and disorganised
medley of starved and disgruntled Highlanders, and the luck was with the
English. Wolfe had little use for his Commander-in-chief, the "Butcher"
Cumberland. "I

have surveyed the field of battle of Culloden with
great exactness," he wrote, "and find room for a military criticism as
well as a place for a little ridicule upon some famous transactions of
that memorable day." Contrasting the conduct of the red-coated,
white-breeched, spatterdashed scum of the English prisons with the
Highlanders with whom he came into contact and had the opportunity of
observing daily, Wolfe came to one conclusion  the Highlanders were
good people and there was admirable fighting material among their young
men. Especially among the Frasers. He did not like their chief but he
saw more in him than did Robert Louis Stevenson. So young Simon, who had
really gone out in the '45 under duress, was commissioned to raise the
Fraser Highlanders  the sons of the men, and the very men themselves,
who only a few years before had fought against the Hanoverian George.
Young Lovat led his clansmen up the heights at Quebec, guided by a
Glasgow man, Major Stobo, and was wounded in the battle. He died a
Major-General in the British army with his title, honours, and estates
restored.

* * * * * *

After the capture of Quebec, a Scot, General James
Murray, served as military Governor of the district and became the first
civil Governor of Canada. He did his best to conciliate the French but
his policy roused the most bitter opposition. He believed, as he
explained to the Lords of Trade in London, that

'Little, very little, will content the New
Subjects, but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading
here, but the expulsion of the Canadians (French), who are perhaps
the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a race who cou'd they be
indulged with a few priviledges wch. the laws of England deny to
Roman Catholicks at home, wou'd soon get the better of every
National antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful
and most useful set of Men in this American Empire.'

Naturally, a man of vision like Murray had his
political and personal enemies. The Scots fur-traders, who had their
headquarters in Montreal, were amongst his bitterest critics. "The most
immoral collection of men" he had ever known, Murray called them, "four
hundred contemptible sutlers and traders." These men complained that the
Governor had adopted a highhanded military attitude towards them and
treated them, when they presented their case before him, with "A Rage
and Rudeness of Language and Demeanour." They managed in the end to get
him recalled, but if the Government in London had only listened to
Murray and taken his advice, many later problems need not have arisen.
On the other hand, the seeds of the policy he had sowed brought forth
good fruit in the near future. The new trouble for England came from the
older colonies in the South.

When these colonies began to get restive, General Sir
Guy Carleton, who had succeeded Murray and became Governor-in-Chief of
Quebec in 1774, took counsel with the leaders of the Roman Catholic
Church and with those Seigneurs who had not gone back to France. One
immediate result was the Quebec Act of 1774. The main object of this Act
was to strengthen British power by attaching the leaders of
French-Canadian opinion more firmly to the British Crown. Many of the
French rights were restored; the Roman Catholics were allowed the free
exercise

of their religion and the clergy were confirmed in
their right "to hold, receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and
rights, with respect to such persons only as shall confess the said
religion." Socially, Carleton with his Versailles-educated wife, the
Catholic Lady Maria Howard, did much to cement relations between the
French and the English, but the very fact that an English Governor of an
English colony should have married a Catholic wife, goaded the
ultra-Protestant colonists in the South to near insurrection. They
regarded the Quebec Act as a challenge to their political and religious
liberties. They petitioned for its repeal on the ground that it
established on the Continent of America a Church and a religion which
they feared and hated. Carleton's paradox that, in order to make Quebec
British, it had to be prevented from becoming English, proved a
boomerang in the end. The famous clash at Lexington on April 19, 1775,
was the beginning of the end of the British domination of the vast
continent of North America. There were Scots on both sides in that
conflict and one of them, John Witherspoon, who had been at one time
minister of Paisley Abbey Church, became possibly the most powerful
propagandist in the revolutionary cause. "Jupiter" Carlyle, who
naturally disliked him intensely, says somewhere in his Autobiography
that Witherspoon was one of the most formidable antagonists of the
British Government in the revolted colonies.

But all the Scots did not become citizens of the new
Republic. One group from Tryon county in the State of New York, women,
children and the older men, trekked north to Glengarry. The younger men
who were fit at all enlisted in the King's Loyal Americans.

* * * * * *

When the Americans invaded Canada in 1775 there were
less than 2,000 soldiers in the country. But one battalion, known as the
Royal Highland Emigrants, or the 84th, was mainly recruited from
colonies of Frasers and commanded by Colonel Allan Maclean of the
Macleans of Torluisk. When the Americans laid siege to Quebec in
December, 1775, a former member the Fraser Highlanders, James Thompson,
organised the defences of the capital. When the Americans under General
Montgomery tried to take the Citadel during a heavy snow-storm, it was a
Scot, "honest Hugh McQuarters of the Royal Artillery", who put the match
to the gun which killed the revolutionary commander and his two aides.
Some of the Scots who took part in the defence of Quebec were Catholics
and Jacobites. "I will help to defend the country from our invaders,"
said one of these, a Cameron, "but I will not take service under the
House of Hanover." When the war was over John Nairne and Malcolm Fraser,
both Captains in the Fraser Highlanders, obtained grants of land in the
neighbourhood of Murray Bay and took some of their men, discharged from
the army, with them. These men, as Le Moyne puts it, became "the
immediate progenitors of genuine Jean-Baptistes  such as the Warrens,
McLeans, Harveys, the Blackburns and several other families who, of
their Scotch ancestry, have retained nothing save the name." [Maple
Leaves, First Series, p. 71.]

Meanwhile the Hudson's Bay trade, which had suffered
during the wars with the French, was picking up again. The Scottish
tobacco trade, ruined by the American war, had driven the Glasgow
merchants to bleaching and dyeing. But the Scot in America had different
ideas. One of the first of these far-seeing speculators was Alexander
Henry, a native of the Scottish colony of New Jersey. Henry, who had
obtained a license to trade on Lake Superior, went into partnership with
an old Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Cadotte, and this association developed,
ultimately, into the North West Company. Henry published the story of
his experiences under the title, Travels and Adventures in Canada and
the Indian Territories, in 1807. Mrs. Jameson, for a time the wife
of the Attorney-General of Ontario and the author of a book on
Shakespeare's Heroines, describes Henry in her Winter Sketches
and Summer Rambles as

'plain, unaffected, telling what he has to tell
in few and simple words, and without comment  the internal evidence
of truth  render not only the narrative, but the man himself, his
personal character, unspeakably interesting . . . He is the Ulysses
of these parts, and to cruise among the shores, rocks, and islands
of Lake Huron without Henry's Travels were like coasting
Calabria and Sicily without the Odyssey in your head or
hand.'

In 1779 the old originals formed a Joint Stock
Company, which was to be known as the North West Company. It was
reorganised in 1783 by that dominating autocrat, Simon McTavish, a Scot
who had been fur-trading in Albany, as its President. One of the charter
members of the Company was James McGill, the founder of McGill
University.

* * * * * *

Another of these Scottish fur-traders was Alexander
Mackenzie, a Stornoway lad. Mackenzie came to Montreal during the
American Revolutionary war and was sent to a post at Fort Chipewyan on
Lake Athabasca. From there he made his celebrated journeys to the Arctic
and the Pacific. He went to the Pacific in 1793 with a Glengarry Scot,
Alexander Mackay, and reached his objective after a series of
hairbreadth escapes. The Mackenzie River he had explored four years
earlier. At the age of forty-five Mackenzie went back to Scotland, where
he published his Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence,
through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific
Oceans, in the years 1789 and 1793. Francis Jeffrey praised the work
highly in the Edinburgh Review; Napoleon read it at Longwood. For
his work of exploration Mackenzie was knighted. He died in 1820.

Another early chronicler of Canada was Alexander Ross
(1783-1856), a Scot in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1849
Ross published the Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or
Columbia River, which the Athenaeum called "one of the most
striking pictures of a life of adventure." He also wrote the Fur
Traders of the Far West, a work which he dedicated to his
countryman, Sir George Simpson, the most famous Governor of the Hudson's
Bay Company. Simpson was a great traveller and the story of his
journeyings in his vast bailiwick was set down in the diary of his
companion, Archibald McDonald. Simpson was a flamboyant, histrionic sort
of character and insisted that the highest deference should be paid him
in his capacity as Governor. But, whatever his faults, he did "a great
work in

Canada in reconciling those who had been deadly
rivals in the North-West and in exploring, opening up and settling this
vast territory. In his long reign . . . he drove home and consolidated
the foundations laid by the heroic efforts of Selkirk and Mackenzie. He
was not a Selkirk, nor yet a Mackenzie, but his name will live."
[Gibb, op. cit. p. 59.] Simpson
went back to London via Montreal, Vancouver, and Siberia, and
published the account of his travels in a Narrative of a journey
Round the World, in 1847. He was knighted in that year and died in
1860.

* * * * * *

The Earl of Selkirk was the fifth of that rank and
title, the uncle of Burns's friend Daer, the lord he "dinner'd wi'" at
Professor Dugald Stewart's. Selkirk, although a Lowlander, had been
greatly perturbed by the 'Clearances' in the Highlands. Realising, with
reluctance, that the English Government would do absolutely nothing to
assist emigration, he decided to do what he could for the Highlanders
himself. Mackenzie's journal had put ideas into his head. The Red River
fascinated him and he decided to settle some of his countrymen there.

* * * * * *

Lord Selkirk had practical experience of the
difficulties of a settler's life in a new country. A settlement of his
in Prince Edward Island had been highly successful; another, composed
entirely of United Empire Loyalists, was doing well on Lake St. Clair.
In order to further his scheme for a Red River colony Selkirk went to
Montreal, then largely a Scottish town. He was warmly received and
lavishly entertained. He met everyone that mattered, discussed his plans
with the great fur-traders and thought he had won them over. In 1810 he
was ready to start work in the Red River area. Then he struck a snag. As
the district he had marked out for settlement fell within the scope of
the Hudson's Bay charter, he obtained a controlling interest in that
Company. But the North West Company, which had been founded in 1783 and
was directed and controlled from Montreal and was a purely Scottish
concern, saw in this move a plot between his lordship and the Hudson's
Bay Company directed against their interests. Mackenzie, the explorer,
and others, although they belonged to the North West Company, then
acquired shares in the rival Company with a view to blocking the scheme.
They failed and 116,000 square miles of land in the Red River district
were set aside for settlement. Selkirk's idea of cultivating the land
was obviously radically opposed to the notions of the fur-traders, who
flourished only because the territory was given over to the fur-bearing
animals. In other words, the traders saw in Selkirk not an altruist who
had nothing but the interests of his poor fellow countrymen at heart,
but a scheming, crafty politician who was seeking to ruin them. His
motives were deliberately misrepresented and the Nor'-Westers did their
best to discredit him and destroy his scheme. But Selkirk pushed on with
his plans.

The first party of settlers, from Stornoway, landed
at York Factory on Hudson Bay in September, 1811. Their leader was a
Scots Canadian, Miles MacDonnel. The following June they reached the Red
River after a seven hundred miles' difficult trek. There, living
conditions were thoroughly miserable. Food was scarce, the half-breeds
were unfriendly. The North West Company sent two Gaelic-speaking
agents provocateurs, Duncan Cameron and Alexander Macdonell, to stir
up trouble among the colonists. Many of them deserted. Finally, under
the leadership of a Scots half-breed, Cuthbert Grant, a number of
hoodlums disguised as Indians attacked the settlement and murdered the
Governor, Robert Semple. The massacre is known as the battle of Seven
Oaks.

This spurred Selkirk to action. He went to Montreal
towards the end of 1815 and tried to get Sir Gordon Drummond, who was in
command of the troops there, to help him. But Drummond refused. Selkirk
then took a hundred Swiss mercenaries of the De Meuron regiment, which
was about to be disbanded, and set off with this force to restore order
in the Red River Settlement. He marched to Fort William, the chief
trading post of the North West Company, occupied it, and arrested a
number of persons, among whom was Simon Fraser, the explorer. Sending
the prisoners eastward for trial, he made a treaty with the Indian
chiefs and gave land to his veteran De Meurons. The worst days of the
settlement were over but Selkirk became the target for the most bitter
persecution. His enemies were utterly unscrupulous and in the end they
drove him from Canada in 1818, a broken man. He died in the south of
France in 1820. After his death the Nor'-Westers and the Hudson's Bay
Company amalgamated, and young George Simpson was appointed Governor.
The man who was mainly responsible for bringing about the amalgamation
was Edward Ellice, an Aberdonian. Selkirk, writes Gibb,

... 'in his courage, his integrity, and his
selflessness, was one of the few wholly admirable men who ever
greatly served the Empire. For great his services were, beyond all
question. His was the vision that foresaw abundance on the plains of
central Canada and his the brain andhand that converted
vision into reality. And that reality is Canadian reality. For had
not Selkirk undertaken his task when he did, it might well, in those
days of indefinite boundaries, have been undertaken by one whose
allegiance was not to the British Empire and so a rich province
might have been lost. But the greatest service of all consisted in
the example of a man, nobly born, rich, beloved, who used and gave
all his gifts and his very life for the sake of Scotland and the
Empire. His name is little known in Scotland to-day. His example has
never been followed.'

In his Observations on the Present State of the
Highlands of Scotland (1805) Selkirk paints a much brighter picture
of his settlement on Prince Edward Island. In 1803 he sent eight hundred
persons in three ships to help colonise the Island. They came from Skye,
Ross-shire, North Argyllshire, Inverness-shire and Uist. Selkirk visited
the new arrivals just after the first ship had landed them.

'I left the island in September, 1803; and after
an extensive tour on the Continent, returned in the end of the same
month the following year. It was with the utmost satisfaction I then
found that my plans had been followed up with attention and
judgment.

'I found the settlers engaged in securing the
harvest which their industry had produced. They had a small
proportion of grain of various kinds, but potatoes were the
principal crop; these were of excellent quality, and would have been
alone sufficient for the entire support of the settlement. ... In
little more than a year, one year from the date of their landing on
the island, had these people made themselves independent of any
supply that did not arise from their own labour.

'Having secured the first great object,
subsistence, most of them are now proceeding to improve their
habitations and some are already lodged in a manner superior to the
utmost wishes they would have formed in their native country. . . .
The commencement of improvement to be seen in some of these
habitations is, I believe, not so much of a personal wish for better
accommodation as of the pride of landed property, a feeling natural
to the human breast, and particularly consonant to the ancient
habits of the Highlanders . . .'

Selkirk's settlement was by no means the first in
Prince Edward Island. In 1771 Judge Stewart of Cantyre in Argyllshire
went there with his family and in 1772 Captain John MacDonald of
Glenaladale led a batch of Catholic Highlanders from Uist and the
mainland to the Island. In 1774 a settlement of Low-landers from
Dumfries, under Wellwood Waugh of Lockerbie, looked the place over,
found it not to their liking and left for Pictou.

* * * * * *

It is not our purpose to discuss the terrible and
tragic story of the Highland "Clearances". There is an extensive
literature on the subject and anyone who wishes to do so may consult
books like Mackenzie's The History of the Highland Clearances,
Donald MacLeod's Gloomy Memories, Donald Sage's Memorabilia
Domestica, Stewart of Garth's Sketches of the Manners and
Character of the Highlanders, Donald Ross's The Glengarry
Evictions, or the Gaelic poems of Duncan Ban Maclntyre, John Maclean,
or Ewan Maclachlan. Bishop Macdonell, who was ordained in 1787 and was
stationed for several years as priest in Lochaber, tells us that "it was
not uncommon to see from one to two hundred families evicted, and the
farms which they had occupied converted into a sheep-walk for the
accommodation of some south-country shepherd, or, as it was termed in
the country, one hundred and fifty or two hundred smokes went through
one chimney." Even Dr. Johnson, who was no lover of the Scots and had
little respect for their loyalties, was profoundly disturbed at the
tales he heard in the Highlands about rack rents and emigration. "A
rapacious chief would make a wilderness of his estate," he commented.
Almost sixty years later, after James Hogg and Sir Walter and Hugh
Miller had said their say about the tragic depopulation in the
Highlands, John Galt takes up the subject in his little known novel,
Bogle Corbet, where the emigrant is represented as saying:

'The Highlands have seen their best days; the
chieftains are gone, and the glory of the claymore is departed for
ever . . . The country is now but for the sheep. Men have no
business here; and one like me, who has lived in activity, makes
misery for himself when he imagines that the stirring spirit of the
world can be brought home to the glen, the island, or the moor.'

The same tragic story is the theme of the well-known
verses, The Lone Shieling, which appeared for the first time in
the September issue of Blackwood's in 1829. John Galt may have
been the author but Dr. G. H. Needier argues very plausibly in favour of
the authorship of Gait's friend, David Macbeth Moir, the Musselburgh
doctor. [G. H. Needler, The Lone Shieling, 1941. Edward MacCurdy
had reached the same conclusion in A Literary Enigma, (1935).]
The poem which is certainly not "from the Gaelic", as its
anonymous maker claims, is the lament of Hebridean Highlanders who have
been exiled to Canada, but might well have been composed by a Lowland
Scot. In fact, the weight of evidence seems to point to its having been
written by a member of the "Delta" or Blackwood circle. The Lone
Shieling also contains a bitter attack on landlords who had shared
in the 'Clearances.' The sentiment of these lines must have stirred the
hearts of Lord Selkirk's emigrants, the men and women who preferred to
face the dangers and distresses of an unknown land rather than endure
the humiliation and torments of their native Scotland:

'From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides:

Fair these broad meads  the hoary woods are grand;
But we are exiles from our fathers' land.

These few words express much of the sorrow and
suffering on which Canada has been built.

* * * * * *

The symposium at "Christopher North's", at which
The Lone Shieling was supposed to have been read, was discussing
among other things the benefits that Scotland was supposed to have
obtained by the Union. The Union had taken place well over a century
before, but some patriotic Scots were no more reconciled to it then than
are some of their successors to-day. A few Scots had managed to climb to
the top in England and in different parts of the Empire.

'As for Canada, why it's as Scotch as Lochaber
whatever of it is not French, I mean. Even omitting our friend John
Galt, have we not hodie our Bishop Macdonell for the Papists
 our Archdeacon Strachan for the Episcopals  and our Tiger Dunlop
for the Presbyterians? and 'tis the same, I believe, all downwards.'

But in Scotland things have been going from bad to
worse.

'Our magnates have been Englified in all their
notions, and that to their own ruin and to ours . .. Our nobility
being wiled away (to all substantial purposes) by the Southron, the
lairds have been left to themselves, and, no examples of really
great wealth being before their eyes to overawe them, they have all,
forsooth, entered into a deliberate system of competition with each
other in point of show and expense . . . The English nobility turn
up their noses at the Scotch . . . From a kingdom, we have already
sunk into a province; let the thing go on much longer, and from a
province we shall fall to a colony . . . They are knocking our old
entail law to pieces as fast as they can, and the English
capitalists and our Glossins between them will, before many days
pass, have the soil to themselves.'

And the Shepherd says:

'Weel, if the gentry lose the land, the Highland
anes at ony rate, it will only be the Lord's righteous judgment on
them. Ah! wae's me  I hear the Duke of Hamilton's cottars are a'
gaun away, man and mither's son, frae the Isle o' Arran. Pity on us!
Was there a bonnier sight in the warld, than to sail by yon green
shores on a braw summer's evening, and see the smoke risin' frae the
puir bodies' bit shielings, ilk ane wi' its peatstack and its twa
three auld donnerd pines, or saughs, or elms, sugh-sughin' owre the
thack in the gloamin' breese?'

The Exile's Song, by Robert Gilfillan, the
following stanza of which was found in the pocket of one of the two
hundred Scottish emigrants who perished when the steamer Montreal
was burned, near Quebec, in June 1857, is another little poem which
expresses the nostalgic mood of the exiled Scot.

'Oh! why left I my hame,
Why did I cross the deep?
Oh! why left I the land
Where my forefathers sleep?
I sigh for Scotia's shore,
And I gaze across the sea;
But I canna get a blink
O' my ain countrie!'

Yes, much blood and sweat and tears has gone to the
making of this Dominion  and the Scots have paid in full.

* * * * * *

During the half century following the '45 there were
many rapid and disturbing changes in the Highlands. The partriarchal
life of the clans became a thing of the past. Land was valuable
henceforth as a revenue-producing investment. New landlords who took
over from the old had few contacts with their tenants and showed little
interest in their personal welfare. The tacksmen who came with the new
landlords were concerned with the people merely as economic assets. The
poor crofters hated the new order of things, but could do nothing to put
a stop to the commercial exploitation of their country. The natural
consequence of these conditions was dissatisfaction and unrest. Many of
the chiefs themselves, although they were gainers financially by the new
system which had turned them into landlords and their clansmen into
rent-paying tenants, were gravely perturbed by the state of affairs. As
one old Argyllshire chieftain said: "I have lived to woeful days; when I
was young, the only question asked concerning a man's rank was how many
men lived on his estate; then it came to be how many black cattle it
would keep; but now they only ask how many sheep the lands will carry."
In discussing the Culloden Papers in the Quarterly Review for
January, 1816, Scott writes:

'In many instances, Highland proprietors have
laboured with laudable and humane precaution to render the change
introduced by a new mode of cultivation gentle and gradual, and to
provide, as far as possible, employment and protection for those
families who were thereby dispossessed of their ancient habitations.
But in other, and in but too many instances, the glens of the
Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population,
but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an
unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as
shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish.'

Increased rentals, unemployment, emigration
propaganda, the promise of political freedom  all helped the embittered
Highlanders to make up their minds to emigrate at the earliest possible
moment or at least to leave their native glens and escape from the
clutches of rapacious landlords. Father Macdonell found work for six
hundred Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholic Highlanders in Glasgow. During
the depression caused by the French Revolution many of these found
themselves unemployed, but the resourceful priest persuaded them to join
the Glengarry Fencibles in 1798 and went with them to Ireland as their
chaplain although this was utterly contrary to the law. In 1804 he was
able to get passage for and to settle large numbers of them in what is
now Glengarry county.

* * * * * *

Almost until the outbreak of the American
Revolutionary War, North Carolina had been a happy hunting-ground for
the Highland emigrant. The most famous of these North Carolina settlers
was Flora Macdonald. Flora's husband was the son of Mac-donald of
Kingsburgh, who had sheltered the Prince for one night after Flora had
brought him to the house, 'maigre, ill-coloured, and over-run with the
scab . . . having had no meat or sleep for two days and two nights,
sitting on a rock beat upon by the rains; and when they ceased, ate up
by flies.' Dr. Johnson and Boswell were entertained by Flora and her
husband, "a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and
fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour." Boswell was grieved to hear
that the Macdonalds were 'embarrassed in (their) affairs and intended to
go to America." They went there the following year arriving in the
autumn of 1774.

At their new home, "Killigray", in Anson County, the
Macdonalds began "the world again anewe." They built a dwelling house
with barns and a kitchen, and took a leading part in the social life of
the community. Allan became a Justice of the Peace, and, in the words of
one of Flora's American biographers, "they were the most commanding
figures among all the Highlanders in North Carolina. Their influence was
everywhere felt and acknowledged." Their hope for the future was bright.
Then came the war between Britain and her American colonies and the
Macdonalds were soon involved in it. In August, 1775, General Donald
Macdonald came from Nova Scotia empowered to raise three regiments of
Royal Highland Emigrants; during the winter months men were
recruited and trained and armed. On the 18th of February, 1776, Flora
watched her countrymen, three thousand strong, march out from
Fayetteville to do battle for their King in the war of the Revolution.
Among the officers were her husband, her son and her son-in-law; they
never came back. A few years ago the Reverend J. A. Macdonald,
("Macdonald of the Globe", who discovered "Ralph Connor"), wrote
a graphic account of the scene:

'The fiery cross had been sent through the
Scottish counties of North Carolina (and) Flora herself had carried
it, summoning the clansmen once again to battle for their king. The
Highlanders came from far and near, and gathered to the Royal
Standard set up in the town square. Veterans were there who answered
the call of Highland chiefs for the Prince in the "Forty-Five," and
with them their sons not out of their teens. Through the solemn
silence of the pine forests the shrill notes of the bagpipes broke
wild and high as in the days of old they sounded through the glen
for Lochiel or Argyll or the Lord of the Isles. On the day of the
march-out, Flora, mounted on her white pony, addressed the troops in
Gaelic as they were reviewed by General Gage. She appealed to their
loyalty to King and country. She rallied them by the memories of
Highland heroism, and .... the clansmen, wild in their enthusiasm,
answered her in fierce Gaelic oaths of loyalty to King George and
defiance to all traitors .... It was a sad and sorry day for
(Flora). Her husband, her son, and her son-in-law, .... marched out
that day to defeat and imprisonment. They were all taken at the
battle of Moore's Creek. As she said herself, she served the House
of Stuart in Scotland and the House of Hanover in America, and she
lost for both.'

After the disaster at Moore's Creek Flora passed
through a horrible period of suffering and persecution. She was turned
out of "Killigray", which was plundered before her eyes. She was
deserted by her servants, robbed of her personal belongings, spied upon,
and dragged before the Committee of Safety to answer a charge of
sedition. In August 1777, seventeen months after his capture, her
husband with his son, Alexander, along with a number of fellow-prisoners
were exchanged for a corresponding number of Americans of equal rank and
allowed to go to New York. In March, 1778, Flora was permitted to join
her husband. She had to sell her silver plate and personal ornaments to
pay the expense of her journey.

A few months later Allan joined his regiment in Nova
Scotia and Flora followed him. This is part of her story:

'I was obliged, tho' tender, to follow, and was
very nigh death's door by a violent disorder the rough sea and long
passage had brought on. At last, landing in Halifax, we were allowed
to stay there for eight days on account of my tender state. The
ninth day sett off for Windsor, on the Bay of Minas, throw woods and
snow and arrived on the fifth day. There we continued all winter and
spring, covered with frost and snow, and almost starved with cold to
death, it being one of the wors(t) winters ever seen there, a
detachment of the Regiment being there; and by ane accedentall fall
next summer (I) dislokated the wrist of the other hand and brock
some tendons, which confined me for two months, altho' I had the
assistance of the regimentall surgeon. When I got the better of this
missfortune, I fixed my thoughts on seeing my native country, tho'
in a tender state.'

In October, 1779, Flora Macdonald sailed for home on
the Lord Dunmore from Halifax. There was a fight between the
British vessel and a French warship, and during the engagement Flora had
her weak arm broken. She reached the Thames late in December. There she
learned of the death of two of her sons. "These melancholy strokes, by
the death of my children," she wrote, "brought on a violent fitt of
sickness, which confined me to bed in London for half a year, and would
have brought me to my grave, if, under God's hand, Dr. Munro had not
given his friendly assistance." In May she was in Edinburgh, at the end
of July she was in Skye, broken and penniless. In 1783 the Highland
Regiment was disbanded and Allan went back to Scotland on half-pay. The
couple spent their few remaining years on the Kingsburgh estate. Flora
died on March 4th, 1790, in her sixty-ninth year: Allan in September,
1792. They lie buried in the ancient churchyard at Kilmuir, Skye.

* * * * * *

After the Revolutionary War many of the Scottish
families who had sided with the Loyalists moved north to Canada. Some of
them settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; others in Upper and Lower
Canada. A number of veterans of the 84th Highland Regiment were given
grants of land in the East River valley in Pictou County. The first
settlement there had been made by a handful of wanderers from Maryland
in 1765, who were joined later in the year by thirty families of
Highlanders. These unfortunates had to suffer a great deal of hardship
owing to their late arrival. In 1773 the good ship Hector, which
had been used by Dr. Witherspoon to bring emigrants to the New England
colonies, arrived at Pictou with thirty-three families from Inverness
and Sutherland. This was the start of a great influx of settlers into
the Lower Provinces, checked for a time, however, by the American War.
When peace was concluded the Highlanders began to emigrate again in
greater numbers than before. Conditions in the Highlands had become
impossible for the very poor. The harvest had failed in 1782; the potato
crop was a total loss. The people were reduced to eating a sort of soup
made of the nettles growing in the churchyards. More than 10,000 were
enlisting every year in the army in order to escape starvation. In 1784,
largely owing to the efforts of Henry Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling",
the Highland Society was founded to encourage the development of
scientific agriculture and to try to bring back some measure of
prosperity to the distressed areas. But the main solution of the problem
of the Highlanders was emigration, until at last the exodus became so
alarming that in 1804 a ban was put on emigrant ships leaving Scotland.
Ten years earlier Dr. Johnson had commented on 'the epidemic desire for
wandering which spreads its contagion from valley to valley' and
declared that something must be done to put a stop to it. One of the
problems created by the second wave of emigration was that the majority
of the exiles were not only young and able-bodied but the workers and
craftsmen of their communities. That created a serious problem for the
Highlands. On the other hand, when they reached their destination many
of these emigrants were literally penniless. In 1815 the Legislature of
Nova Scotia had to vote £500 for their relief. [D. M. Sinclair,
"Highland Emigration to Nova Scotia", Dalhousie Review, vol.
xxiii, No. 2, July, 1943]

The Pictou Scots, Highland and Lowland, like their
countrymen at home, were great believers in education, and, no matter
whether they themselves were well or poorly educated, they were
determined that their children should not suffer in this regard. But it
was not easy for poor people, no matter how ambitious they were for
their children, to make headway in a Province where not only education
but every office of honour and emolument was in the hands of the
privileged few. For some time after Halifax was founded in 1749, its
official persons were English rather than Scottish, Anglican rather than
Presbyterian. They were apt to form a selfish oligarchy in
ecclesiastical as in civil politics, regardless of the views of other
Nova Scotians. King's College had received a royal charter in 1789, and
was generously supported by the Government, but it was hedged round with
denominational restrictions and made a preserve for Anglicans. Others
were debarred from a college education and, consequently, from any
chance of advancement. This was all the more absurd, as the majority of
the people were non-Anglicans.

In Pictou, so we learn from John McGregor, whose
British America appeared in 1832,

'In the streets, within the houses, in the shops,
on board vessels, and along the roads, we hear little but Gaelic and
broad Scotch. The Highland dress, the bagpipe, and Scottish music
are also more general in this part of the country, while the red
gowns of the students which we see waving here and there like
streamers, bring the colleges of Aberdeen and Glasgow with their
associations into recollection.'
[St. Andrew's, too, wears "the scarlet gown". Andrew Lang, in his
tender and lovely Almae Matres has expressed what everyone
must feel who knows and loves the place:

'St. Andrews by the Northern sea,
A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and grey.
The grey North Ocean girds it round.
And o'er the rocks and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound . . .
The drifting surf, the wintry year,
The college of the scarlet gown,']

It was not likely that the Scots would continue to
acquiesce tamely in this inequable state of affairs. But they needed a
leader. They found him in the Reverend Mr. McCulloch, a young minister
from Renfrewshire who had studied Arts and Divinity at Glasgow.
McCulloch had accepted a call from a congregation in Pictou and was
inducted into his new charge on June 6, 1804. The congregation was poor
and the minister's salary was paid irregularly; it left nothing over for
luxuries like new books, gave no feeling of social security. But
McCulloch was a fighter and feared no man. After he got "settled down"
he took stock of the situation and found many things little to his
liking. Education was one of them; there was an obvious necessity for a
change there. Of course the easier way would have been to accept it; if
he had not been McCulloch, he might even have taken orders in the Church
of England and possibly have become a bishop. But McCulloch was no
worldling like Strachan: he came of stern anti-Burgher stock, and if he
was no mystic or inspired visionary, at least the flesh-pots made no
appeal to him. He believed that a principle was involved  the question
of popular rights as against class privileges, and he did not shirk the
issues.

McCulloch opened a school in Pictou which became the
famous Pictou Academy. He wanted to make it into a College, supported by
the Government and open to all who desired learning and deserved
education. But he also wanted to make it a Seminary to train ministers.
The project became tangled in politics, and he grew disheartened over
the hostility and indifference shown even by those of his own Church. In
1838 he went to Halifax to become the first President of Dalhousie
College, which had been founded by Lord Dalhousie in 1818 on the model
of Edinburgh, but which had been prevented by political intrigue from
carrying on the work of a non-sectarian university. Pictou Academy
maintained the high standards which McCulloch had set; twenty years
later its graduates, studying classics, mathematics, and science at
Edinburgh or Glasgow, competed on even terms with men trained in
Scottish schools. For Dalhousie his immediate ambitions were modest and
sensible. In a letter to Charles D. Archibald, written in 1838, the year
in which he began his new work, he wrote:

'In the present state of this province all that
is requisite is a professor who can give his pupils specimens of
just translation, and instil into them ideas of accuracy of
interpretation. Afterward if they choose to devote themselves to the
study of languages, their collegiate instruction will contribute to
their success, but should they direct themselves to the real
business of life, they will not have just cause to complain that
they have spent their youth upon studies foreign to their success.
If Dalhousie College acquires usefulness and eminence, it will not
be as an imitation of Oxford, but as an institution of science and
practical intelligence.' [Life of Thomas McCulloch, by his Son,
William McCulloch, pp. 172-3.]

The secret of McCulloch's influence lay in his
ability and enterprise, in the encouragement which he gave and the
enthusiasm which he inspired for higher education among people who had
hitherto regarded its acquisition as an unattainable ideal. This was no
mean achievement even in a level-headed and progressive province like
Nova Scotia, for, as one scholar points out, at that time

'. . . . the majority of communities, not only in new
countries like (Canada), but even in the old leading nations of Europe,
were very indifferent with regard to the benefits of popular
instruction. If the labouring classes in town and country were mostly
provided with employment and sufficient food to maintain life and
enjoyed, besides, the advantages of religious ministrations, the nature
of which they but imperfectly understood, they were considered by the
higher orders sufficiently cared for. Their mental wants and social
improvement were objects but of secondary importance, the belief of many
being that workmen needed little, or no knowledge beyond that necessary
to the proper performance of their manual tasks. "Popular rights",
"popular instruction" and "popular franchise" were phrases rarely or
never heard in an age of aristocratic jealousy and exclusiveness;
mediaeval routine and prejudice were still supreme, while national
objects centred in dynastic wars and schemes of self-aggrandisement.
Clear-sighted and philanthropic men .... were by but too many regarded
as well-meaning theorists. However, in Montreal, an eminent Scotch
merchant, the Hon. James McGill, had established for himself a permanent
claim to the gratitude of its citizens by his noble endowment of an
institution . . . .' [P. Bender, Old and
New Canada, 1753-1844, or, The Life of Joseph-Francois Perrault.
(Montreal, 1882).]

McCulloch also made some contribution to the early
beginnings of Canadian literature. In 1832, remembering, no doubt, Sir
Walter's "Malachi Malgrowther" letters in the Edinburgh Weekly
Journal, he published a series of "Chronicles" in the Acadian
Recorder. William Blackwood thought highly of them and invited the
author to become a regular contributor to "Maga". But as McCulloch
detested the Tory politics of Black-woods he declined the offer.
After a visit to Scotland in 1825-6 he planned to write something after
the style of John Gait's Ringan Gilhaize as a reply to Scott's
caricature of the Covenanters in Old Mortality. He carried out
his plan and sent the manuscript to friends in Scotland. But it got lost
and McCulloch never tried to re-write it. Some years before the
appearance of the "Chronicle of Our Town" a fellow-Scot, who was born in
Glasgow, John Young, published the Letters of Agricola in the
Acadian Recorder. The purpose of these articles, which were widely
read and greatly appreciated, was to suggest to the farmers of Nova
Scotia means by which they might improve their crops by a more
intelligent cultivation of their soil.

* * * * * *

The Scots have been prominent in journalism in
Canada. The Halifax Gazette, which was established in 1752, was
hardly a newspaper in the modern sense of the word, being devoted almost
entirely to the publication of military and governmental intelligence.
The first real Canadian newspaper was the Quebec Gazette, which
was founded in 1764 by two Scots, William Brown and Thomas Gilmour, who
had come from Philadelphia. The Canadian Revieiw and Literary and
Historical Journal (1824-6), which contained 240 pages of solid
reading in each number, was modelled after the Edinburgh Review.
But the most noteworthy periodical of Pre-Confederation times was the
Literary Garland (1838-1851) to which the celebrated William
("Tiger") Dunlop (1792-1848) contributed his Recollections of the
American War 1812-4. Dunlop was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came
to Canada in 1826 with John Galt. He had led an interesting life, had
served as surgeon with the Connaught Rangers in India and retired from
the army on half-pay. He had lectured in Edinburgh on Medical
Jurisprudence, done editorial work in London, contributed regularly to
Blackwood's, and was an intimate of the "Christopher North"
circle. In Canada he not only continued to write for Blackwood's
but contributed to the Canadian Literary Magazine of York, as
well as to the Literary Garland of Montreal.

Dunlop was also the author of a guide to emigrants
called The Backwoodsman, which is not to be confused with Two
and Twenty Years Ago, A Tale of the Canadian Rebellion, of which he
is also the author. Of The Backwoodsman the Lizars wrote
in their pleasant gossipy chronicle, In the Days of the Canada
Company:

'The little book did great work in its day,
and was instrumental in bringing out settlers of a different stamp
from those then on the way or in the humour for emigrating.'

But if Nova Scotia holds the primacy in the
intellectual development of the Dominion, and if the Scots have made a
great contribution to the intellectual development of Nova Scotia and of
Canada as a whole, they have not made a corresponding contribution to
what one might term the creative literature of the country. A very great
proportion of the Canadian people are the descendants of the working
populations of the Old World. That does not imply that there was any
inferiority in brain power or potentiality, but the fact that these
Scots who had to toil with their hands for a living were sadly lacking
in cultural background and a cultural background has obviously much 
though not everything to do  with the making of creative and critical
literature. Alexander McLachlan, the Glasgow tailor who came to Canada
in 1840 and wrote part of an epic, The Emigrant, reflects the political
radicalism which the Scots brought to Ontario; but he is at best an
imitator of Burns without a trace of his genius and he was not in the
true sense of the word a Canadian poet. Evan MacColl, who was born in
Inverary in 1808, and wrote in Gaelic and English, was never happy in
Canada and his best poems are about the Scotland he had left and which
he could never forget. In sentiment MacColl is purely Scottish.

These emigre poets had one standard  the work of the
poets in the country of their birth. They made no attempt at
originality; they had no new-fangled theories about their craft. They
merely sought to interpret their emotions in the speech and the rhythms
they had been brought up on. They had no conception that there might one
day be a truly Canadian literature which would seek to express itself in
the rhythm of a Canadian people. "Revolt is essential to progress," said
Duncan Campbell Scott some years ago, "not necessarily the revolt of
violence, but always the revolt that questions the established past and
puts it to the proof, that finds the old forms outworn and invents new
forms for new matters." It needs insight and education to understand all
this, and the emigres were sadly lacking in these essentials.

* * * * * *

The Scots did make, however, a contribution to the
early literature of Canada  the folklore and balladry of their native
land, in English and Gaelic. The ballad is very old, but to-day, except
in concert halls or at musical gatherings, one rarely hears a ballad.
That is not the fault of the people who made them; it is simply that the
times have changed and literary fashions along with them. The ballads,
which we call "popular", did not come into the world in the ragged and
irregular form in which we have them to-day. The "common people" as they
were called, recited the ballads they liked and so preserved them
despite the thunders of the Reformers and the fulminations of
generations of ministers who were as narrow-minded as they were "gude
and godlie", and in spite of the invention of printing and more exacting
standards of criticism and new literary modes of expression. But the
people who composed these old ballads in England and Scotland were men
of culture and good social standing, whose position was midway between
the stately court poets and the "common people" we have mentioned. Their
work was passed on by word of mouth, went through many hands, and by
slow degrees became corrupt. In the reign of Edward
IV, the King's Minstrels, as the professional makers of ballads
were called, formed themselves into a Fraternity, or Popular Gild. They
were granted a charter and members were appointed for life. This step,
Bishop Percy tells us in his Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, was
necessary to protect the royal entertainers from certain "rude
husbandmen and artificers of various trades (who) had assumed their
title and livery, and under that colour and pretence had collected money
in divers parts of the kingdom, and committed other disorders." But like
other ancient Orders, the Minstrels, decayed in time and with them the
ballad. We get a glimpse of these "makaris" in their decline in a
curious book, The State of the See of St. Andrews, which was
written by George Martine in 1683. "To our fathers' time and ours
something remained and still does of this ancient order," he writes.
"And they are called by others and by themselves jockies; who go
about begging and use still to recite the sluggornes of most of the true
ancient surnames of Scotland from old experience and observation. Some
of them I have discoursed, and found them to have reason and discretion.
One of them told me that there were not twelve of them in the whole
isle; but he remembered when they abounded, so that one time he was one
of five that usually met at St. Andrews."

The story of the Scots ballads in Nova Scotia can be
read in W. Roy Mackenzie's two fascinating volumes, The Quest of the
Ballad and Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia. The ballads
which the Scottish exile brought with him and crooned and recited in his
isolated little circle, acquired in time a local colouring. Then they
began to wither and die. Some have survived as greatly modified relics;
others have vanished from the memory of man. What happened to the
Scottish ballads in Nova Scotia was exactly what happened to them in
Scotland. The Scots experienced a change of heart and in their new
scheme of things there was no place for the vain and profane art of
ballad-making or ballad-singing. Newcomers to the Province, men of mixed
French, Alsatian, and Swiss descent and parentage, "a singing and a
song-loving race", picked up what the Scots had thrown away or
deliberately allowed to fall into neglect. The man who was mainly
responsible for converting the ballad-loving, fiddle-playing,
rum-drinking early Scots settlers into a race of sober-sided Puritans,
was the Reverend James McGregor, who was born in St. Fillans in
Perthshire in 1759. McGregor's father was a disciple of Ebenezer Erskine
and he himself was brought up under the stern discipline of the
Anti-burghers. Almost at the beginning of his ministry he heard the call
to labour among his Highland countrymen in Nova Scotia. He arrived in
1786. But let Dr. Mackenzie have the word:

'There were unredeemed Scots who refused to
subject themselves to the laws of Moses and the precepts of St.
Paul, and there were pious children of Huguenot fathers who believed
that the cause of righteousness could be better served on earth by
singing the songs of Zion than by entertaining their friends with
ballads of profane love and adventure. But so much at least is
certain: in my time the only districts in which the ancient ballads
of Scotland have appreciably survived are those where the Huguenot
settlers built their homes near those of the Scotch farmers .... In
the upland region the case is sadly different. Here the Scotch alone
cleared the land for their hamlets and farms in the early days,
rejoicing sternly in the spectacle of hills that strangely
materialised their recollections of the older Scotland. A regional
song composed over a hundred years ago by Alexander McRae of the
West River .... ends with the significant lines

Now I'll pass on to the head of the river,
For there I do mean for to dwell,
For there it wants nothing but heather
To make it like bonnie Dunkeld.

In those brave days the Scots of the West River
could not only compose new songs about the country of their adoption
but could also draw at will from a goodly store of old songs which
had sprung from the soil of their parent land; and now the popular
ballads which made glad their hearts have survived only as a vaguely
remembered tradition or have failed to perpetuate even the faint
record of a title or a name.' [Mackenzie,
Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia. Introduction, pp.
xvii-xviii.]

After the Napoleonic wars many retired half-pay
officers were confronted with a serious problem  the future of their
families. Most of these men were unfit for a commercial career both by
temperament and previous military training. One possible outlet for
their energies was farming, and the district North of the St. Lawrence
in Upper Canada seemed an ideal location. "There were many who possessed
small capital . . . but it was not everyone who possessed the judgment
and industry required for a life in the bush (as readers of Mrs. Moodie
will agree). As an octogenarian (a wealthy man who came to the country
as a lad in service and saw his master and his master's friends
disappear, their means dissipated, and the world and themselves no
better for their having been) has said, "Sure they all had money; but
few of them had any sinse, and none of them knew how to work".'
[Robina and Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars, In the Days of the
Canada Company, p. 20.]

The two chief propagandists in favour of a policy of
emigration were John Galt and William Dunlop, whose guide to emigrants,
The Backwoodsman has been already referred to. Galt, who was
famous as a novelist, had long been interested in the question of
emigration and had managed to get himself appointed as legal agent for
those settlers in Upper Canada who claimed compensation for losses
incurred during the war of 1812 with the United States. But he soon
realised that the problem was much bigger than merely having to decide
how much money was to be paid to individual claimants. It was, he saw,
really a matter of opening up, and developing the resources of a vast
and unexplored territory. He therefore organised what was known as the
Canada Company, in London, which was to finance the enterprise, and had
himself appointed secretary. He sailed for Canada as one of five
commissioners, appointed jointly by the government and the Company,
whose duty was to negotiate for the sale and the settlement of the
Clergy Reserves. He was away from England, engaged on this work, from
January to June, 1825. Things went wrong, however. The Anglican Church
in Upper Canada strongly objected to the sale of their reserves when it
came to the point, and the matter was left for final negotiation between
Galt and Archdeacon John Strachan. Strachan was an Aberdeen Scot who
came to Canada in 1799 to be a teacher in Cornwall and Kingston. On the
advice of the Honourable Richard Cartwright, who had been largely
responsible for his leaving Scotland, Strachan, originally a
Presbyterian, became a member of the Church of England. He took deacon's
orders in 1803 and went to York in 1812 as rector.

That was in the days of the Family Compact. This
oligarchy was identified with the Church of England and Strachan became
its mouthpiece. The Family Compact, wrote William Lyon Mackenzie in his
Sketches of Canada and the United States, (1833)

'surround the Lieutenant-Governor, and mould him
like wax to their will; they fill every office with their relatives,
dependants, and partisans; by them justices of the peace and
officers of the militia are made and unmade; they have increased the
number of the Legislative Council by recommending through the
Governor, half a dozen of nobodies and a few placemen, pensioners
and individuals of well-known narrow and bigoted principles; the
whole of the revenue of Upper Canada are in reality at their mercy 
they are Paymasters, Receivers, Auditors, King, Lords, and Commons.'

Galt had thus to meet a formidable opponent, and the
result was that the Clergy Reserves were withdrawn from the market and
an enormous tract of unsurveyed land of more than a million acres,
recently purchased from the Indians, was substituted. This was the
so-called Huron Tract, and Gait's great work was the opening up of this
virgin territory. "Profit to the Company, which I saw would come of
course," he told his friend, David Macbeth Moir, "was less my object
than to build in the wilderness an asylum for the exiles of society,  a
refuge for the fleers from the calamities of the old world and its
systems foredoomed."

The charter for the Canada Company was granted in
August, 1826, and in October Galt sailed for Canada for the second time.
Dunlop went with him. They landed in New York on November 23. There,
according to Charles Lindsey, who wrote his Life;[Lindsey, Life of William Lyon
Mackenzie, (1862).]they learned of
the trial of William Lyon Mackenzie, the editor of the Colonial
Advocate. Gait's connection with Mackenzie was a slight one, but it
caused him much trouble and vexation of spirit.

* * * * * *

Mackenzie, the son of poor parents, was born in
Dundee, Scotland, on March 12th, 1796. Put to work at an early age he
was in turn a draper's assistant, a clerk in a counting-house, and the
proprietor of a small "general" store and a circulating library in the
little town of Alyth. The business collapsed, and in the spring of 1820
the disgruntled young fellow sailed for Canada. He tried his hand at
various trades in that country, too, and failed in them all. Finally,
when just under thirty, he decided to start a newspaper in Toronto.
The Colonial Advocate, which made its first appearance on May 18,
1824, and ran for ten years, was bitterly opposed to the Family Compact
as the enemy of popular education, of a liberal immigration policy, and
of civil and religious liberty. But, although the paper was the
mouthpiece of the Reform party, it was not a financial success and
Mackenzie soon found himself in difficulties. Then he had a stroke of
good luck. A gang of young "Mohocks" in York, as Toronto was then
called, who belonged to the Upper Four Hundred, decided to get rid of
their enemy once and for all. On June 18, 1826, they broke into the
office of The Colonial Advocate during Mackenzie's absence,
smashed the printing machinery and scattered the type. The Compact
realised too late that this act of vandalism was likely to prove most
damaging to their interests, for popular sympathy immediately swung
round to Mackenzie and he became a political martyr overnight. Dr.
Strachan and his friends tried through Hon. J. B. Macaulay to make a
settlement but Mackenzie refused even to consider the proposition and
the case went on trial. It was heard before Chief-Justice Campbell, a
Scot who had fought on the Loyalist side during the Revolutionary War,
and the plaintiff was awarded heavy damages. The net result of the
affair was that an obnoxious journal, which probably would have perished
of inanition, received a new lease of life, and its proprietor was at
once elevated to a prominent place in the sympathies of the people."

On his previous visit to Canada Galt had read The
Colonial Advocate and had spoken a few words in praise of the paper.
During his trial Mackenzie remembered this and claimed Galt as a friend.
That was enough for Strachan and his friends and Galt was from then on
regarded by the Compact as a man of dangerous radical sympathies.
Already during the course of his negotiations for the purchase of the
Clergy Reserves, Strachan had shown his dislike for Galt's ideas. The
latter wanted no paupers or wastrels among his settlers; they must have
good character references and be able to pay their way. They had to be
men of enlightenment and progressive ideas, and men of enlightenment
were regarded by Strachan and Peregrine Maitland, the
Lieutenant-Governor, as dangerous enemies of the Family Compact.
Maitland's dislike for Galt was of long standing. According to his
latest biographer, it "had some connection with (his) satiric
reflections on the Church, expressed in his Letters from the Levant
(1813). 'If you have read Mr. Gait's published Tour through the
Levant, no sneer or insinuation with respect to the Established Church
could surprise you'." Thus, from the beginning of his work, Galt had to
face the jealousy and the disapproval of the higher circles of Colonial
Government. In Maitland's eyes especially, Galt could do nothing right.
His actions and motives were constantly misrepresented to his Board of
Directors at home, and in the end he was removed. His immediate reward
for the splendid work he did in Canada was incarceration for months in a
London debtors' jail.

After Galt's deposition the Scots who had taken up
their lands in the township named after Sir John Colborne, revolted
against the autocratic rule of the Canada Company. The Lizars paint a
most pleasing and attractive picture of "The Colborne Clique", as it
came to be known, and of the social gatherings at Goderich. That is one
side of the picture. But there is this other: "In Upper Canada, Scotsmen
denounced and reviled one another, they tyrannised over one another and
in the end they did not hesitate to take up arms and slay one another in
the field."

William Lyon Mackenzie was a grim, bitter sort of
man. J. W. L. Forster's admirable painting reveals his character very
plainly. He was born and bred in an older Scotland which produced such
men  men of iron will, of unshakable convictions, dour, uncompromising
men who hated class privilege and social wrong, who had something of the
Celt in them, vision and enthusiasm which, if thwarted, could easily
kindle into fanaticism. Such men are bound to clash with authority and
when they do they either go to jail and disappear, or triumph in the end
and leave their imprint on history.

Mackenzie was elected first Mayor of Toronto by
acclamation in 1834, after having been expelled from the Assembly three
years earlier for his scurrilous tongue. The Family Compact pursued him
relentlessly; he was assaulted physically, his meetings were broken up,
his life was threatened. After the appointment of Sir Francis Head as
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1836-7) an election was held in
which the Family Compact had a large majority; Mackenzie failed to be
returned to the Assembly. Thoroughly disgruntled, he saw only one way to
get his ideas put into effect. The Upper Canada rebellion was the
result. The story of that rebellion is told in a rare little volume,
Two and Twenty Years Ago; also in

Anison North's Forging of the Pikes. The
latter story gives an excellent and realistic sketch of Toronto in 1837;
also of Mackenzie. After the fiasco at Montgomery's Tavern, Mackenzie
had to go into hiding, and finally managed to escape across the border
into the United States, where for a time he was a nuisance to the
Canadian Government. He came back to Canada twelve years later, only to
find that a new king had arisen over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.
During his absence many of the reforms for which he had fought had been
brought about, and his day as a political gad-fly, or reformer, was
ended. The Papineau rebellion which took place in the same year as
Mackenzie's, 1837, helped to emphasize the need for speedy action on the
part of the authorities, for that uprising was not so much an armed
protest on the part of the French-Canadians against British rule as it
was a gesture of sympathy with Mackenzie's onslaught on the Family
Compact. Despite his bitterness against Strachan, Mackenzie was
wholeheartedly in favour of the Archdeacon's project for the University
which he was trying to get started and for which he secured the Charter
in 1827. And Mackenzie was among the first to suggest a confederation of
the British North American Colonies.

* * * * * *:

Another Scot, prominent in the days of the Compact,
was Robert Fleming Gourlay. Gourlay, who was a friend of Dr. Thomas
Chalmers, was born in Fifeshire about the year 1780. After a chequered
career in England he sailed for New York in 1817. He visited some
relatives in Canada, was well received by the authorities, and came to
the conclusion

that this was "the most desirable place of refuge for
the redundant population of Britain." That was exactly the sort of thing
that John Galt and William Dunlop had been saying, and the Family
Compact did not like it. They would have let it pass if Gourlay had gone
back to New York. But he did not go back to New York. When the
Legislature was suddenly, and as it seemed to him, arbitrarily
prorogued, with its business unfinished, he decided to take a hand in
the local political game, with results that were disastrous for himself.
"Without the slightest idea of evil," writes this "Banished Briton and
Neptunian", "he took the novel step of proposing that a Convention
should be called of Deputies from all the constituencies to deliberate
upon the propriety of sending Commissioners to England to call attention
to the affairs of the Province." [Statistical Account of Upper
Canada, compiled with a view to a Grand System of Emigration, by
Robert Gourlay (London, 1822). Genera] Introduction.] This was too much
and the Family Compact decided to eliminate this new critic of their
rights and privileges. The man who led the attack on Gourlay was again
the "turbulent priest of Toronto", the Reverend John Strachan. Gourlay
did not mend matters by characterising the cleric as 'that lying little
fool of a renegade Presbyterian.' Strachan may have been "one of the
most unlovable and unchristian men of God who ever put on a surplice,"
but he was certainly a dangerous man to cross. Gourlay was prosecuted on
the charge of having libelled the Government; that attack failed. A
private action against him had no success either. Then his enemies
changed their tactics. They passed an Act which made
illegal such conventions as Gourlay had called for the purpose of
expressing grievances. Gourlay protested against this measure and the
Government replied by throwing him into jail, illegally, under a statute
directed against aliens. It was an extraordinary action to take against
a loyal British subject, and, what made matters worse, Chief Justice
Powell would neither set him free nor grant him bail. When he finally
was brought to trial he was sentenced to leave Upper Canada within
twenty-four hours on pain of death. He left the Province and found
refuge in the United States. When the sentence of banishment was
annulled, Gourlay returned to Canada and petitioned the Canadian
Parliament for compensation. His imprisonment was declared by that body
to be "illegal, unconstitutional and without the possibility of excuse
or palliation" and Sir Charles Bagot granted him a pension of £50 from
the Civil List, which was declined. Gourlay went back to Edinburgh,
where he died in 1863.

Gourlay was an honest man but a rash one. He had only
been a few months in Canada when he began interfering in politics about
which he knew nothing. He failed completely to realise that the men who
had successfully repelled the American invaders in the war of 1812 had
no wish to see their position and their gains challenged by immigrants
and riff-raff from Europe and the United States. Mrs. Anna Jameson
describes some of these people. She saw them while on a visit to Colonel
Talbot at his Castle of Malahide:

'On leaving my apartment in the morning, I used
to find groups of strange figures lounging round the door, ragged,
black-bearded, gaunt, travel-worn and toil-worn emigrants, Irish,
Scotch and American, come to offer themselves as settlers. These he
used to call his land-pirates and curious, and characteristic, and
dramatic beyond description, were the scenes which used to take
place between this grand bashaw of the wilderness and his hungry,
importunate clients and petitioners.'

Gourlay had no patience with Lyon Mackenzie and his
ideas of "independence of European domination for ever." In his
Banished Briton, No. 2, he thus addresses his fellow Scot:

'Mr. Hume is a little man, and you, less. During
four years in the United States I have witnessed far worse than
European domination. You call yourself a patriot, and fly from home,
and enlist scoundrels for the conquest of your country. This is
patriotism with a vengeance: but God will avenge. I am, more in
sorrow than in anger, yours, etc. R.F.G.'

Gourlay was a man of vision. He hailed the Durham
Report with enthusiasm as "candid, fearless, straightforward, and to the
point." But the Serbonian bog of partisan politics was too strong for
him to struggle against, and it engulfed him.

******

Another Scot who has left his imprint on Canada is
James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin. Elgin, who had been educated at Eton
and was a Fellow of Merton, came to Canada in 1847 as Governor-General,
at the age of thirty-six and stayed in the country until 1854. It was a
difficult time. Canada had hardly recovered from the effects of the
Mackenzie and Papineau rebellions and although the two provinces of
Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, there was still much
political unrest and a bitter feeling of racial animosity. Under a
Governor of less tact, understanding and patience, Canada might well
have been lost to the Empire. Elgin was a great reconciler. He invited
Papineau to dinner and found him 'a very well-bred, intelligent man.'
[J. L. Morison, The Eighth Earl of Elgin, pp. 89. ] He delivered
the speech from the Throne in English and French and asked the Baldwin-Lafontaine
Ministry to return to power after the Reform Party had scored a complete
victory at the close 1847. He had a great deal to do with the
establishment of Responsible Government and successfully negotiated a
Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. His stand on the Rebellion
Losses Bill led to disgraceful rioting in Montreal and to cowardly
attacks upon himself, but Elgin remained unmoved. It was his courage in
assenting to the Rebellion Losses Bill that made responsible government
in Canada a reality. Elgin is remembered by French-Canadians as the
Gouverneur aux larges vues et au coeur droit and his place is
amongst the greatest of the Governors-General of the Dominion.

* * * * * *

In the same year that William Lyon Mackenzie came to
Canada another Scot arrived  John A. Macdonald, then a child of five.
His father settled in Kingston, a city with which his famous son was
associated until his death in 1891 and where he lies buried. Macdonald
studied law, was admitted to the Bar, and came into public notice by his
eloquent defence of von Schultz, who had taken part in the 1837 invasion
of Canada in support of Mackenzie. Macdonald's defence was unsuccessful
and Schultz was hanged at Fort Henry in Kingston.

In 1844 the young lawyer was elected Member for
Kingston and three years later he became Receiver-General in the
Conservative Government. The life story of "John A." has never been
satisfactorily written on a "now-it-can-be-told" basis. He was
many-sided. His weaknesses were obvious, but they were balanced not only
by his quick wit and ready humour, but also by his genuine and genial
kindness. The most popular figure in Canadian political history, beloved
as well as admired, "John A." is the subject of countless stories, but
he is never the butt. With the vision of a great statesman, he had a
practical mind; he saw that the old party lines were breaking down, and
he believed that the immediate future in politics lay with a
Liberal-Conservative coalition. In 1854 he succeeded in forming a
permanent alliance with the majority of French-Canadian Liberals, by
this time under the leadership of Cartier. Along with Alexander Tilloch
Galt, the son of the founder of Guelph, as Finance Minister, this
coalition held power for almost a dozen years. Not that its supremacy
went unchallenged. On the contrary. Its chief assailants were the
left-wing Clear Grits, who were mainly Scots Presbyterians. Their leader
was George Brown, who hated, above all things on earth, the Roman
Catholic hierarchy and "John A."

* * * * * *

George Brown was born in Edinburgh in 1821. His
father, an unsuccessful business man, emigrated to New York in 1838.
There he founded the British Chronicle, which was intended to
become the mouthpiece of British opinion in the United States. George
Brown did his best to make the paper a success, but that was impossible.
He went to Canada to try to push its sale and while he was there the
great Disruption of the Church in Scotland took place. Knowing the type
of man he was and the opinions he held, certain friends of the Free
Church approached him and invited him to put their case before the
Canadian public in the press. The result was that, instead of the
British Chronicle, the Banner appeared on August 18, 1843.
The paper, which was published in Toronto, was religious in tone and
leftist in politics. The Banner presently became the Globe,
the first number appearing on March 5th, 1844. Through the Globe
George Brown became a mighty power in the land.

* * * * * *

Meanwhile Canada was slowly emerging from the purely
colonial stage; she had won self-government in domestic affairs; she had
seen the secularization of the Clergy Reserves and the abolition of the
old seigneurial system of tenure. But the Clear Grits, or Reformers,
were still far from satisfied. One reason was that although Canada West
had by now by far the larger population, owing to steady overseas
immigration, she had no corresponding parliamentary representation. The
Grits therefore raised the cry, "Representation by Population," and the
result was, in the words of O. D. Skelton, that "Macdonald, relying for
power on his alliance with Cartier, could not accept the demand, and saw
seat after seat in Canada West fall to Brown and his "Rep. by Pop."
crusaders." [Skelton, The Canadian Dominion, pp. 138-9.] But the
success of the "Rep. by Pop." party acted as a boomerang and with the
even balance of parties the work of government became almost impossible.
Between 1854-1864 there were actually ten Ministries. The
Liberal-Conservative Government of 1864 found itself powerless.
Something had, obviously, to be done, if the work of administration were
not to be reduced to a mere farce.

It was George Brown who, when all attempts to form a
Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, came forward with the
suggestion that the party leaders should unite in working out some kind
of federation. The result of this gesture was that a Coalition Cabinet
was formed in which the Tories, Macdonald and Galt, sat in deliberative
council with the leftists, Brown and Macdougall. Brown had seen the
light at last and in order that that light should shine more brightly he
had shown his willingness to subordinate himself and his former
principles to the greater cause. In June, 1864, a Coalition Cabinet was
formed with Sir Etienne Tache as nominal Premier. Macdonald and Brown
were members of it. At the Quebec Conference, which met at Quebec on
October 10th, the dominating figure was Macdonald. In February, 1865, he
introduced resolutions in favour of confederation and later in the year
a delegation consisting of Macdonald, Brown, Galt and Cartier left for
England to discuss the question of confederation with the British
Government. Late in 1866 the delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick met in London, and in consultation with the British Colonial
Office drew up final resolutions. These were embodied in the British
North America Act, and on July 1, 1867, the Dominion of Canada came into
being.

With the birth of the Dominion, George Brown vanished
from the political scene, but the intellectual qualities of his
editorials in The Globe continued to have a vast influence in the
country. He became President of Council and a Senator, refused the
honour of K.C.M.G. and died from the effects of a shot fired by a
discharged employe at the Globe office.

* * * * * *

Meanwhile Sir John had been going from strength to
strength. He was not merely the first Premier of the Dominion of Canada;
he was a man of wide imperial vision with a concept of Empire that was
far ahead of his times. His ideal was a free federation of independent
peoples bound together precisely as the British Commonwealth is bound
together to-day  a voluntary association of free nations owning a
com-man allegiance to the Crown. Gailly de Taurines wrote of him:
"Son oeuvre fut digne de son talent: Un Etat grand comme l'Europe
entiere, baigne par deux oceans, et traverse par la voie ferree la plus
etendue de l'univers, certes, c'est la une creation dont plus d'un
serait fier." Alexander Mackenzie, the Logierait boy who arrived in
Canada in 1842 and became Prime Minister in 1873 when "John A." went
into temporary retirement owing to the Pacific Railway scandals, was a
mere pygmy compared with his Disraeli-ish-looking fellow Scot. Mackenzie
was a builder and contractor in Kingston and Goldwin Smith said of him,
when Premier, that he was still a stonemason. A rigid teetotaller,
Mackenzie was a hardworking and conscientious man and his administration
accomplished much good work including the creation of the Supreme Court,
the introduction of voting by ballot, and temperance legislation. But he
had no popular appeal and speedily lost touch with the feeling of the
country. Macdonald bided his time and worked subtly for his opponent's
undoing. At the election of 1878, which was fought on the protection
issue, Macdonald's 'National Policy' easily carried the day and he
converted his minority of forty-five into a majority of eighty-six.
Mackenzie, the free-trade theorist, resigned as leader of the Opposition
two years later. And Canada has remained protectionist.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the politician, worked in
close collaboration with the French-Canadians; in fact, if it had not
been for their support he could not have remained in power for so long.
It has been suggested that he understood the French-Canadian better than
the Englishman, and that he preferred him. In a letter to Sir John Rose,
the Aberdonian who had been the first Minister of Finance for the
Dominion and was then living in England, Macdonald wrote a propos
of the Louis Riel troubles:

Private.

Ottawa, February 23rd, 1870

'Bishop Tache has been here and has left for the
Red River, after exceedingly full and unreserved communication with
him as to our policy and requirements, all of which he approves. He
is strongly opposed to the idea of an Imperial Commission,
believing, as indeed we all do, that to send out an overwashed
Englishman, utterly ignorant of the country and full of crotchets,
as all Englishmen are, would be a mistake. He would be certain to
make propositions and consent to arrangements which Canada could not
possibly accept.'

Primarily Sir John cultivated the French in his own
interests. He was not concerned with their religion, like George Brown,
but, on the other hand, the thought of the 'Auld Alliance' and the
Catholic Stewarts, and the past of Scotland must have made a powerful
appeal to the romantic Scot whose father was a dispossessed Macdonald.
And it must not be forgotten that, while he made his political alliance
with the French, Macdonald drew much of his strength and his reputation
from his close association with fellow-countrymen like George Stephen,
James Ross, Sir William Mackenzie, Sir Donald Mann, David Macnicol, Sir
William Whyte and Sandford Fleming. Without these men he could have done
comparatively little.

* * * * * *

Compared with Sir John A. Macdonald, the vast
majority of his fellow-Scots seem colourless and almost insignificant,
and his death, which took place in 1891, marks the end of an epoch. But
there are many other Scots names that occur at random  John Neilson,
who was born at Dornald in Kirkcudbright in 1776 and edited the
Quebec Gazette for many years; John Gordon Brown, who succeeded his
brother as editor of the Globe; Thomas McQueen, an Ayrshire lad
who founded the Huron Signal at Goderich in 1848 and fought the
battle for Responsible Government; John Maclean, who was born in Glasgow
and came to Canada in 1838 when he was thirteen and advocated Protection
in his People's Journal; Alexander Somerville, who belonged to
Haddingtonshire, an ex-Colour-Sergeant of the 8th Highlanders who became
widely known under his pseudonym, "The Whistler at the Plough." Richard
Cobden thought highly of Somerville's work and said of his Toronto
articles on Canada: "I know nothing in the English language, which for
graphic narrative and picturesque description of places, persons and
things surpasses some of the letters of Alexander Somerville, the
"Whistler at the Plough'." James Innes, who hailed from Huntly made a
notable contribution to the cause of reform in the Guelph Mercury,
of which he became editor and publisher in 1862; John Lesslie, who
arrived from Dundee in 1820 and set up business in "Muddy Little York",
selling books and drugs, gave William Lyon Mackenzie one of his first
jobs in Canada. Two years later the rest of the Lesslie family sailed
from Scotland and made their home in Dundas. During the Rebellion of
1837 the Lesslies suffered at the hands of the drunken militia and had
the honour of being stigmatized, by Bond Head, as "notorious
republicans." Later, James Lesslie purchased the Examiner and the
two brothers fought the battle for religious equality. In 1854 the paper
was sold to George Brown of the Globe.

* * * * * *

Some of the earliest chronicles of Canada in English
were written by Scots, but these works were Canadian by accident and are
to be found mainly in the libraries of collectors. No Scot has left his
mark on the literature of Canada as has Macdonald on politics or
Mackenzie in exploration. In 1848 R. M. Ballantyne, a nephew of Scott's
printers, published a record of his personal experiences during a
six-years' residence in the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company.
The Young Fur Traders appeared in 1856 and Ungava in the
following year. But Ballantyne was a writer of boys' stories. It was not
until 1897, with the publication of "Ralph Connor's" Black Rock
in The Westminster, a Presbyterian monthly magazine, that the
Canadian novel began to come into its own. "Ralph Connor" was not
Scottish born, but his people were Highlanders settled in Glengarry. His
novels, like those of Lucy Montgomery, have a strong religious
atmosphere, and the influence of the Manse is found in them all. The
same may be said to-day of the work of Grace Campbell and of C. Holmes
Mac-gillivray. Contemporary novelists lie beyond our scope, but these
writers embody in their novels the religious and social ideals that came
to Canada with Scottish immigrants. Another novel, which excellently
reproduces the atmosphere of a Presbyterian community and at times
reminds one of the Annals of the Parish, is St. Cuthbert's,
by Robert E. Knowles. The Span of Life, which was written by
William Mac-Lennan and Jean N. Mcllwraith, is an admirable tale of
Jacobite days and of the Chevalier de Johnstone, subjects treated more
recently by Thomas Raddall. The Flying Years, by Frederick Niven,
is a link between the Scottish Highlands and the rapidly developing
Canadian Northwest.

Duncan Campbell Scott, the most austerely
intellectual of Canadian poets, has nothing Scottish about him except
his name. That is as near as he ever gets to Scotland. Wilfred Campbell
called himself a Scot, and his hymn to "The World Mother" is a panegyric
upon Scotland. The setting of his play, The Heir of Lynne, is
Scottish, and he wrote ballads and three long novels on Scotland. On the
other hand, Alexander Muir, a Scot, was stirred to write his famous
verses, The Maple Leaf, in Canada, Muir was born in Lesmahagow,
Lanarkshire. A graduate of Queen's University, he taught school in
Ontario until his death in 1906. The Maple Leaf, the song which
made Canada articulate, was written, and the words were set to music by
the author himself, in 1867, the year in which the British North America
Act was passed and the Dominion became a reality.

The Scots have had little to do with Canadian drama.
Its volume is small and its quality poor. One early Scottish actor of
the name of Ormsby, who played in Montreal in 1804, appeared on the
stage, drunk. But there are at least two distinguished Scottish names in
Canadian music  Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie and Sir Ernest
MacMIllan. George A. Reid, William Brymner, and William Cruik-shank, the
grandnephew of the caricaturist, are Canadian artists of Scottish
descent. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an
Edinburgh man.

* * * * * *

We have touched on the matter of the Scottish
contribution to the higher education in the Dominion. That cannot be
over-estimated. McGill, Toronto, Dalhousie, Queen's, St. Francis Xavier,
Morrin College were all founded by Scots. The re-establishing of
Dalhousie as a University in 1863 was almost entirely Scottish. It was
the Aberdonian John Strachan, when he was Anglican rector of Cornwall in
Ontario, who persuaded the Glaswegian James McGill to bequeath his
48-acre estate and £10,000 for the purpose of establishing a college
which would bear his name. The University was formally opened in 1829,
Strachan being one of the original trustees. The first Principal of
McGill was the Reverend John Bethune, the son of the Presbyterian
minister of Williamstown. There was organising ability in the family;
after having served as Chaplain and being taken prisoner along with
Flora Macdonald's husband in the ambush at Moore's Creek, this Skye-man
went to Montreal when the Revolutionary War was ended, and organised the
first Presbyterian congregation in Ontario, about 1786. The future
Principal was a pupil of Dr. Strachan's at the Cornwall Grammar School
and succeeded him when the latter went to York in 1812. Alexander Neil
Bethune, a brother, was another pupil of Strachan's and ultimately
succeeded him as second Bishop of Toronto. Dr. Strachan, who had secured
a charter for King's College, Toronto, in 1827, was President of that
institution for twenty-one years, and when the College was separated
from the Anglican Church in 1849 and secularised, the Bishop gathered
funds for a new College, and Trinity College was established in 1852.
Bishop Strachan preferred to cater for students of the English type
rather than the Scottish and his educational ideals were far removed
from those of his Northern Alma Mater.

The Queen's tradition, on the other hand, has always
been strongly Scottish. The university was founded primarily to train
ministers for the Church of Scotland in Canada. On the Charter granted
in 1841 appears the name of John A. Macdonald and the majority of the
other twenty-five names are Scottish. The first Principal, Dr. James
Liddell, was a Scot and every one of his successors has either been a
Scot or of Scottish descent. St. Francis Xavier, which was founded in
1853 and became a University in 1866, is a college chiefly for Roman
Catholics of Scottish origin. The University of New Brunswick has
distinguished Scots on its roll  names like David Grey, James Robb, and
William Brydone Jack. In Manitoba we find Archbishop Machray and
Principal John M. King a Presbyterian graduate of Edinburgh.

Although not all the educational influences that have
come to Canada through Scotsmen have sprung from Scottish ideals of
training, yet in the main there are certain elements in our Canadian
system which follow the Scottish ideal. The cultivation of individuality
and self-reliance, for example, is Scottish rather than English or
American. If the Canadian student on the average takes more naturally to
science than to literature, this is easily accounted for by the lack of
opportunity for linguistic or literary study in the schools or in the
early days at home. Many of the best teachers of science have come from
Scotland, or have studied there. Sir William Logan, an Edinburgh-trained
Montrealer, published his monumental Geology of Canada in 1863.
Sir William Dawson, the geologist and one of the great builders of
McGill, was a Pictou boy of Scottish origin. He was educated at Pictou
Academy, and at Edinburgh University which was for long the dominating
influence on Canadian science and scholarship.

******

There are many other Scots who deserve honourable
mention in our survey  Sir James Douglas, who was the first Governor of
British Columbia, and the Honourable William Dickson who founded Galt
and brought out many emigrants from the South of Scotland. Scots were
the pioneers in the export trade in lumber to Britain. During the later
stages of the

Napoleonic Wars, when Britain was denied free access
to the Baltic, her source of timber, the British Government decided to
turn to the timber resources of the North American colonies. A timber
firm, Pollock and Gilmour of Glasgow, was granted a huge empire of
timber on the Miramichi in New Brunswick and also given preferential
customs rates and Admiralty contracts. They prospered from the start and
several huge fortunes arose out of this venture. At one time, in the
thirties of last century, the firm had over a hundred ships plying
between Canada and Britain and on the return voyages they brought out
emigrants. They extended their operations to Quebec City, to the
Gatineau Country and even to Trenton in Ontario.

The woollen industry in Canada also owes its start to
Scots emigrants. Through the efforts of Lord Archibald Hamilton, the
Whig member for Lanarkshire, many people from that county were settled
in what was called the Bathurst district, now divided into the counties
of Lanark and Renfrew. Among them were many weavers thrown out of work
by the coming of the power loom. These weavers brought their weaving
skill and traditions with them and some of them started woollen mills in
the Ottawa Valley. Today Almonte, Arnprior, Perth and Carleton Place
have their woollen mills. [See Andrew Haydon's Pioneer Sketches in
the District of Bathurst, (1925).]

* * * * * *

Now we must write FINIS to our short essay on The
Scot and Canada. He has by no manner of means ceased to make his
contribution, but Canada is no longer a second Scotland, as it was in
the days of "Christopher North." The Scot who comes to Canada to-day 
if he decides to remain in the country  has to fit into the mosaic, and
in the fullness of time he becomes a Canadian citizen  not just a
Scotsman resident in Canada. Canada is now Canada and not merely another
British Dominion, and a Canadian is a far more definite political entity
than a Scotsman because there is no such thing, officially recognised,
as a Scottish citizen, while there most certainly is a
Canadian citizen. That is because Canada is looking more to the
future than to the past and can consolidate her position internationally
only by welding her miscellaneous population into a homogeneous whole;
homogeneous, that is to say, in undivided allegiance if not in racial
outlook, to the ideals of liberty and progress for which the Dominion
stands. And for the same reason too, Scotland has begun to repair her
fences.

Scotland is an old country but she is still young in
spirit. She has reached that stage in life, however, when she realises
that she must conserve her forces. That does not mean that she feels she
is finished or that the time has come for her to quit. On the contrary.
Scotland has attained to an honourable position in the world; she has
won it by character and hard work. She had few natural advantages to
start with and to-day she could not hope for one moment to compete
economically or financially with more richly endowed nations. Therein
lies not her strength. The Jacobites who gathered round Prince Charles
at Glenfinnan were an insignificant group; but they were a devoted band,
and although they went down to defeat at Culloden, their deeds as told
in song and story still ring down the years. So it is with Scotland and
her people  a little land as countries go but a land that has been
inspired with a great vision. Scotland's story is a long tale of bitter
struggle in the cause of Freedom. She has just emerged with deep but
honourable scars from the Second World War and is hotly engaged in the
stern battle of rehabilitation and is seeking to hold the rewards of
peace. It is not an easy fight. But she will not fail. Despite
disappointment and frustration and past failure Scotland goes forward in
this belief:

'The brotherhood of man is no longer a text for a
pulpit sermon. The claim of our national poet, Robert Burns, that "a
man's a man for a' that", must now be the practical politics for
this new scientific age. Ideas are power, and it is now for the
people of all nations, and particularly the Scots, through the
teaching of Robert Burns, and by the force and confidence of our
expression and belief in the brotherhood of man to ensure that brave
new world so many seek.

"That man to man the warld o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that".

This is the faith which she has handed on to her sons
and daughters in Canada.

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